What is Defraggler doing?

[eraserhead]

I'm not sure if this is a bug or designed behavior, but I am certainly curious.

 

I was testing Defraggler on a secondary drive where I've used 37 out of 120 GB. I ran D and it showed 978 fragmented files. I ran another product that showed the same number and defragged with it as it is faster. I went back to D and it showed 0 fragmented files, but then attempts to defrag the drive. I checked to see if defragging free space was a default behavior and it doesn't appear to be the case. I cannot think of any other reason that I would see file names continue to display in Defraggler as if it is working.

 

Any insight would be appreciated.

 

Ron

[jawz101]

It's the difference between moving pieces of one file together to make that individual file one piece (ie contiguous/defragmented) and moving files around for improved file placement on the hard drive platter.

 

When you think of file fragmentation visualize something like this:

 

 

Say a file is on your drive, then needs to get bigger but has no room to grow in the surrounding area, so it must pick another spot to add the additional size. Eventually this leads to fragmented files.

 

Now, say you have temporary internet files (pictures and webpage code) that you accumulate during your internet browsing which you pull down from the web as you surf various websites. These small files get dispersed on the drive and potentially flushed as you delete them through cleaning programs. What a defragmentation software might do is move files that are rarely changed or accessed to the inner/outer portions of the drive - if they are accessed more frequently and remain unchanged over time I imagine a defragmentation program possibly moving them to the center of the drive as it is less circumference, though I'm sure there are better defragmentation algorithms out there- and temporary files on the outlying edges of the drive since they'll be added & deleted more frequently.

 

If you hit defragment the application is accounting for individual files being fragmented and putting them back together but also an idea of optimal file placement to A) reduce future fragmentation and B ) put files on the disk in positions that would give it nanoseconds more read time.

 

So if it's moving files around defraggler is doing file placement.

 

Alternately, if you just want to put the fragmented files together and disregard files placement- in defraggler hit analyze, then click on the files tab, check all fragmented files and defragment from there. This is much quicker for making files contiguous

[eraserhead]

Thanks much for the explanation. Back in the character-based days, I had a program that gave the user those options.

 

I suspect it would be beneficial to show the user what is taking place. I think the overhead in doing so would be minimal. It is frustrating not to see what is going on, especially as I have waited too many times for an endless loop to complete.